Thomas Swick
New Year’s morning there was a traffic jam on I-95. I had been enjoying the rare smattering of cars, the wide-open spaces, when all of a sudden a parking lot appeared.
This was not the usual slowdown: packed lanes stopping and starting with a grudging but perceptible progress. This was a thick, torturous, whose-idea-was-it-to-go-to-Miami-anyway clogging. Cars were slowly abandoning the left lanes and tentatively insinuating themselves into the ever greater congestion on the right. The reason for this incremental funneling became clear at the exit to Ives Dairy Road, where, we discovered, all of the southbound lanes were closed.
South Florida vanities come to dust on I-95.
Still, we made it to Little Havana in time for lunch: vaca frita with plantains and moros. Afterwards, we continued on our de rigueur tour of the city—Brickell, downtown, the Design District, the MiMo District—keeping our eyes peeled for the new and the vanished.
A cavalier attitude about the past, not just in Miami, was always tied to a national belief in progress. But now, at least here, you wonder if it’s a result of the opposite: a fatalistic view of the future. Who cares what’s torn down when it’s all going to be under water eventually?
At 82nd Street we made a left, signaling our inevitable drift back to the Interstate and Broward County.
I am always a little sad to leave Miami. It’s a big city, unlike Fort Lauderdale, and when I’m there I’m away from my desk; it provides a break from work, a feeling of release, the temptation of abandon that’s heightened in places like Calle Ocho, with its nearly nonstop music. I stroll its sidewalks, the deco streets of South Beach, Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, as something other: neither local nor tourist. I’m the neighbor who keeps popping in.
The alumni gathering was held at a restaurant on the Intracoastal. To avoid the traffic, we took A1A along the beach, past the luxury condos (“Is there any other kind now?” my friend Don recently asked me) and then the Sea Tower, my favorite building in Fort Lauderdale and one of the finest examples of Midcentury Modern in South Florida. Its balconies, with their laced, molar-shaped concrete railings, rise ten stories in a gentle white curve a block from the ocean. No matter what time of day I pass it, I always imagine the people inside sipping martinis and listening to Sinatra.
I talked to a man who writes a blog about eating out in South Florida. “Friends from New York come down and say, ‘Where’s your great Chinese restaurant?’ There isn’t one. ‘Where’s your great French restaurant?’ There isn’t one. I come back from New Jersey with loaves of rye bread.”
Later, I spoke with a man who was born and raised in Miami and now makes his home in North Miami Beach.
“You know what the problem with Broward is?” he asked.
I readied myself for something more damning than a lack of great restaurants.
“The traffic lights aren’t synchronized.”
Last night Hania and I took a walk around our condo complex. It was one of those flawless winter evenings. I hate when travel writers describe a tropical, or even a subtropical, place as “paradise,” but our hibernal privilege is frequently to go about after sundown like people in cartoons of heaven: not hot, not cold, not windswept, not rained on. The atmosphere is drained of not just extremes but also characteristics, in the meteorological equivalent of flatlining. One of my old freelancers, a retired New York Times reporter, once described winter evenings in South Florida as having “a beautiful innocuousness.”
Drove to Hollywood for take-out stone crabs. The delicious sweetness of the meat is heightened by the knowledge of a limited tasting (October to May). Also, there’s something about cracking the ceramic-like shells that mimics the Hellenic joy of smashing plates.
Finally made it down to La Trova in Little Havana. A large crowd congregated at the bar and a band played on the stage: blaring trumpet, fedora-ed singer. As we were seated, people got up to dance between the tables.
I hate loud restaurants but the music and dancing won me over. We even lingered, but didn’t dare dance, after our meal of ceviche and croquetas. Finally, I walked to the bar to get change for the valet. The bartender, in white shirt, black vest, and black bow tie, came over immediately and shook my hand. Then he crisply, obligingly, made change for a twenty.
The valet dropped off our car with the air-conditioner blasting, the temperature set at 66. Sometimes I think that the great divide in South Florida is not linguistic but climatic. There are people here who crave the cold and others who came here specifically to escape it.
The Miami Book Fair featured a panel on an anthology about getting around Miami. A man sat in the front row dressed like a carnival barker, his doughy face topped by a small red hat, his large stomach half covered by trousers that were held up by brightly colored suspenders. He was introduced by the moderator as T.D. Allman, author of Miami: City of the Future, and he had the first question which, as often happens at the book fair, was not a question, it was—this was rarer—an advertisement for his most recent book, Finding Florida, a copy of which he held up high for all to see. His audacity, and his complete lack of concern for what others might think, I found shocking and slightly, in an odd way, admirable.
Last night we had our building holiday party, that event at which you try to have conversations in the lobby with the people you struggle to make small talk with in the elevator. Most of the people I wanted to see didn’t show (including almost all of the residents below the age of forty).
“Do you ever do any editing?” John asked me. John is a professional waiter who has worked at some of the best restaurants in Broward.
“I used to be an editor,” I told him. “Why? Are you writing a book?”
He was, he said; a memoir. He’d written about two thousand words. I’m always surprised when I hear of people sitting down and writing things. I do it, but I’m a writer. What helps them is their innocence, their complete lack of knowledge about the publishing industry. Though a waiter’s memoir might provide a nice break from the glut of writers’ memoirs.
A man walked along the dock this morning in a blue and orange GATORS T-shirt. I’m thinking of getting one, perhaps green and orange, that says IGUANAS.
Tuesday, my face a patchwork of Bandaids after my visit to the dermatologist, I stopped at Barnes & Noble in Boca. Walking through the parking lot I ran into Mike—one of those unexpected encounters you expect in cities but not in South Florida. As we sat with our drinks in the café, he said it was great to see me because he had some news.
“Helen has Alzheimer’s.”
He talked quite calmly about it, giving the chronology, and then he broke down. “All of a sudden your life changes,” he said, starting to lose it. “We know how this ends—and it’s bleak.” His eyes filled with tears and his arms, which he held out in front of him, began to shake.
I told him how sorry I was. Almost as shocking as the news was seeing my friend, whom I’d only known in good spirits, convulsed by tragedy. He started to talk about an upcoming trip to Philadelphia to see their daughter, and his mandatory visit to the art museum. “I get enough of blue skies here,” he said, “I want to see them in paintings. I need artifice.” He talked about Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which he keeps on his night table. He seemed almost his old self, but I knew he wasn’t.
As I drove home it occurred to me that one of the many unpleasant aspects of aging is that chance meetings with friends, which once invariably brought delight, can now be touched with darkness.
A rare, after-dark walk to our neighborhood park that borders the New River. We reached the gazebo just as a large yacht, its warm interior all aglow, eased into the turn. I love looking in people’s living rooms, and gazing into one that’s floating down a river raises the pleasure to a whole new level.
A woman I once mentored arrived from Wisconsin and I gave her an abbreviated tour of Miami, starting in the Gables—the Biltmore Hotel (making the dramatic approach down Columbus Avenue), the Venetian Pool —before heading up to Calle Ocho. A band was playing at Ball & Chain, and one old resident was dancing with a buxom tourist. He had that smoothness that seems innate in Cubans, his hips and his feet having lost little to age.
I asked Caroline if she’d like a drink; she said she doesn’t really drink alcohol. She had eliminated caffeine from her diet as well, but made an exception for a cafecito across the street.
Finished, we took a stroll, checking out the tobacco store, the Tower Theater, Domino Park. At one point we passed the dancer walking down the sidewalk with his plastic shopping bag and looking like any plodding, slightly hunched senior.
Driving down Davie Boulevard, I saw a man sitting in a lawn chair in front of his house. He wore nothing but shorts and a hat; his hands clasped a beer bottle in his lap. He looked completely out of his time—no smartphone, no iPad—and perfectly at home in the world.
Cleaning my office, I came across a copy of Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his account of the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968, the first of which took place in Miami Beach. Mailer begins the book with a short history and description of the city, focusing, as so many people do when writing about South Florida, on the destruction of nature by development, the ruthless paving over of “the coastal strip” for condominiums and hotels. Though he distinguishes his lament with an odd question: “Is it so dissimilar from covering your poor pubic hair with adhesive tape for fifty years?”
It always puzzles me when writers bemoan a lost Eden in the growth of South Florida—as if the cities they come from emerged fully-formed at the Creation. The country, the world, was all unspoiled wilderness once; the Hudson River flowed past virgin forests before emptying into the Atlantic. What happened to our islands is no different from what happened to the island of Manhattan—in fact, it’s much less of a transmogrification. Is it because the nature here is a mix of the tropical and subtropical, a northerner’s vision of “paradise,” that its subjugation seems more objectionable? Or is it simply that the desecration in South Florida occurred more recently—that here it’s still within living memory while in New York it’s ancient history?
Whatever the time difference in our removes from nature, our returns to it, through the rising of the seas, should be more or less simultaneous.
Spent Saturday afternoon at Sawgrass Mills. While Hania shopped, I sat outside on a bench and read, looking up every few sentences to observe the passing parade: Jewish families, the men in yarmulkes, the women in wigs; Black teenagers in unbelted jeans; women in saris that gave them an air of gliding rather than walking. I caught snippets of Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic; Spanish was almost as plentiful as English. Forget Place de l’Opera in Paris; Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise is now the world’s main street.
I have been on a memoir kick so naturally I’ve gravitated to one of the modern classics: Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time. Some of the chapters are set in Fort Lauderdale and environs; the author’s family lived for a few years in a new municipality called Chula Vista. I had never heard of it but, googling, I discovered that it is south of Davie Boulevard—which Conroy calls Dania Boulevard—just west of I-95. When he lived there it was a workers’ community carved out of wooded wilderness, the creation of a Wisconsin socialist who gave a plot of land to anyone willing to build his own house on it.
Most of the Florida action takes place in this subtropical Arcadia—at least that’s how it appeared to an adventurous young boy—but there are a few scenes from Fort Lauderdale Beach, where a cousin lives, and a few from downtown, to which the young Conroy sometimes rides his bike. One day he grabs the tailgate of a chicken truck, “peeling off at the foot of Los Olas Boulevard” to catch a movie at the Sunset Theater.
The misspelling pained me—from a writer so attuned to language. But it didn’t eliminate the thrill of seeing even the incorrect name of our main street—the one I drive down at least once a week—in a work of literature. Now Las Olas had a transcendent, once-unimagined importance.
Floridians often see something, or hear of something, and say with satisfaction: “Only in Florida.” Florida Man notwithstanding, we often have an exaggerated sense of our exceptionalism. Yet the other night on my walk around our complex I came across something that would be hard to imagine outside South Florida. A Jeep Patriot sat in the parking lot, its engine running, its driver still behind the wheel. An American flag was attached to a side window, and two decals of the Stars and Stripes decorated the back; four if you counted the two in the Harley Davidson sticker stuck to the window. Out of the vehicle floated the velvety voice of Carlos Gardel.
For our anniversary, we went to an expensive Chinese restaurant in Miami. We were seated in a row of empty tables along the wall, which seemed a kind of exile from the lively part of the dining room. I always wonder: Do they know we’re from Broward? Is it obvious in the way we look, how we present ourselves? Our waiter, the only Chinese member of the waitstaff, explained that the restaurant prided itself on its authenticity. Then why, I felt like asking, was it blasting American music? The wailing was totally inappropriate for the surroundings, a dark, high-ceilinged room lit by small, elegant table lamps. Traditional Chinese music, played softly, would have been perfect. We mentioned this later to the manager, who claimed that to survive in Miami the restaurant had no choice but to play loud music. I think he exaggerates. Mandolin, the Turkish-Greek restaurant in Buena Vista, plays barely audible Greek music in a quiet garden that is usually packed. Whenever I go there, I’m struck by the number of intelligent-looking diners. And then I realize: They’re people with something interesting to say and they’ve come to one of the few restaurants in Miami where their words can be heard.
Eating ice cream in Coconut Grove, we got talking to a couple with a golden-haired daughter and a four-week-old baby. They were from Venezuela. The man’s family had a factory in Caracas, to which he had driven every day in a bullet-proof car. “That is no way to live,” he said. “How do you explain that to children?” They’ve been in Miami—Doral, to be exact—for four years; he runs a printing business and she works as a pediatrician. “Here you know how things work,” he said, “there’s a system that you must follow.” As he talked, I felt good about my country, but then realized that many countries look good in comparison to Venezuela. Still, it pleased me that we were still giving hope and opportunity to the world’s less fortunate. At least the more privileged of the less fortunate.
A long, lovely drive to Key West.
The theme of the Key West Literary Seminar was Florida. Participating authors included Carl Hiaasen, Karen Russell, Lauren Groff, Jonathan Escoffery.
“Hello, I’m Dave Barry,” the humorist said, taking the microphone. “If you don’t know who I am, I’m a famous author.”
It was a funny line that also said something about the position writers hold in contemporary society. (The twenty-something sitting next to me had never heard of Dave Barry.) When William Styron’s picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, a lot of Americans knew who he was. Should Lauren Groff’s face ever appear on that cover, the majority of citizens will be clueless. But then most Americans no longer see Time.
Later, walking down Greene Street, we came upon a short man with straggly blond hair holding a large paperback book.
“Can I read you a poem by Anna Akhmatova?” he asked.
I told him I was surprised he wasn’t offering a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. (Just the fact that a man was reading poetry on the street would have been surprising in any American city other than Key West—and perhaps San Francisco.)
“No,” he said flatly. “I only read poems that give me pleasure.”
Looking down, I noticed a violin in its case.
“Do you play?” I asked him.
“Not anymore,” he said.
“Did you used to play—on Duval Street?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you Swedish?”
“Yes.”
I thought he had looked familiar, minus a few teeth. In 2006, during another Key West Literary Seminar, I had been walking with some friends down Duval when we had come across a busker playing the violin. Stopping to chat, we learned that he was from Sweden.
The Swede had seemed then, as he seemed this night, some kind of plant, sent out by the Chamber of Commerce, though he was simply an independent contractor of the sort that puckish island attracts.
Sunday we had brunch at the French bakery on Duval, where our waitress was Georgian and the manager from Siberia. Then we made the long drive home, stopping in Islamorada to see the monument to the victims of the 1935 hurricane. Down a side street we found a food truck and a beer garden with a band playing bluegrass. Next to the truck, three Ukrainian women were making pierogi. A Florida that went unmentioned at the literary seminar. We bought a batch to bring back home.
Last night Bob Dylan played the Broward Center.
I wouldn’t have gone if he’d been in a big arena, but I liked the fact that he had chosen an elegant concert hall that was almost literally down the street. I still regret not seeing Sinatra when he performed there in the ’90s, even though his voice was shot by then. For Dylan, a shot voice was signature, and immutable.
A multigenerational crowd loitered in the lobby. Men outnumbered women, a few of them paunchy in black, declarative T-shirts. My seat in the mezzanine was between two large males. Rick, who introduced himself first, was with his wife; Steve sat with his wife and twenty-something daughter. “She told me about the concert,” he explained. “I didn’t even know she listened to Dylan.” Then he launched into a detailed history of the music scene in Detroit.
The curtain went up, thankfully, a little after eight, revealing a dimly lit stage with Dylan seated in the center at a piano. Without introduction, the band launched into the first song. Followed by the next one. After about the fourth, a woman shouted “Like a Rolling Stone!,” which of course Dylan ignored. “Gods do not answer letters,” John Updike wrote of Ted Williams’ refusal to come out of the dugout after hitting a home run in his final at-bat.
A couple times fans started clapping rhythmically to a melody, then quickly stopped. They craved the shared, raucous communion of a rock concert, but the so-called Rough and Rowdy Ways tour had more in common with a recital. People listened silently, reverently, straining to make out the words of a laureate. Up in the mezzanine, I failed miserably; the most success I had was with a song about Key West.
But the voice—that voice that has been wailing in the background of my life for more than half a century—had a hypnotic effect. The hall at times took on the stillness of a dream, not least because I was hearing Bob Dylan on the banks of the New River.
Outside, afterwards, I passed a middle-aged couple speaking Spanish. The woman was from Costa Rica, the man from Venezuela, though they now lived in Hallandale.
“Did you have trouble understanding him?” I asked.
“Yes,” the woman said. “But he was still great.”
I asked them about the last song. Dylan had played the harmonica and it had given me chills. I told them I thought I had heard faint echoes of Blowing in the Wind.
The woman looked at me and said: “That’s because you wanted to.”
A weekend in Sarasota, the highlight of which was visiting the Amish neighborhood of Pinecraft.
Businesses were closed, as expected on Sunday, but the streets were animated by people riding large, three-wheeled cycles—the men in beards and black hats, the women in long dresses and white bonnets. The one-story houses often had cycles parked in front, a few had laundry drying on a line. They were small and close together, like in a compound, with tiny front yards and very few trees. Here and there a circle of people sat talking on a side porch. Sunday visiting. Occasionally a woman in a dark dress, her face to the sun, stretched on a chaise. I had never seen an Amish person getting a tan, at least not by lying motionless.
We came across one supine woman reading a book. I stopped the car, and she got up to chat.
“Are you from Pennsylvania?” I asked her. She was. She said that she was going back tomorrow. Most of the Amish here, she told us, come down for a few weeks in the winter. I had thought that they were permanent residents, perhaps even farming here, but later I read that they had been lured down in the 1920s but found the soil unsuitable for the celery they thought they could grow. Yet they had enjoyed the sun, and the warm weather, so they started to come down every winter. And if you think about it, much of Amish life is spent outdoors; Florida gives the people the opportunity to increase the time they spend outside. And if it means riding a cycle instead of driving a buggy (Sarasota doesn’t allow horses on its roads), so be it. The woman told us that the house behind her was an Airbnb she had rented for her stay, and that next week young people would be coming for Spring Break. It was odd hearing these two modern-day institutions appear in the German-accented speech of a woman in 18th century dress.
Friday we went to Nubé, the new rooftop bar atop the Hilton on Fort Lauderdale Beach. We got a table on the side, overlooking the Four Seasons, A1A, the beach, the ocean—and watched the light change as the sun descended. One of the owners came over to say hello—I know him from my days at the newspaper—and comped us dessert (which as a journalist I wouldn’t have been able to accept). The crowd had the distinctive look of young Lauderdalians on town—the women trying too hard, in tight dresses and high heels, and the men not trying at all.
Pulling into the parking lot of Trinity Cathedral we passed two women in bikinis. Evensong in Miami. Inside, the Anglican Chorale, more modestly dressed, sang the music of Thomas Tallis.
The launch party for the second issue of The Miami Native was held at Bey Bey in Sunset Harbor. Outside the restaurant I picked up a copy, as big as the old Holiday magazine, and with equally winsome artwork.
Inside, the crowd was predominantly young and female and radiantly cool. Everyone seemed to know everyone. The feeling I had of being out of place—even though I had an essay in the issue—was made bearable by the sensation of being invisible. Eventually I found an older group, which included the editor’s mother and grandmother. This seemed a sweet Miami touch: You throw a hip party for your new magazine and, of course, you invite your abuela.
Dinner Tuesday with our friend Joe at Greek Islands Taverna. The back room was empty, reserved for a private party, so we took a table outside, next to the big window.
Joe’s arrival was followed by that of a few members of the Florida Panthers, who the night before had won the Stanley Cup.
Black SUVs started pulling in and depositing more tall, well-built men in beards. We had difficulty identifying many of them.
“Maybe if they pinned somebody against the wall,” Joe said. “Oh yea, that’s Reinhart.”
Through the window, we watched what looked like a cocktail party for the genetically blessed. Then they all sat down to dinner.
Around eight o’clock another black SUV pulled into the parking lot and another giant in T-shirt and shorts, Aleksander Barkov, extricated the Stanley Cup from the back. He carried it into the restaurant and the place erupted in cheers. He lingered for a while in the front room, so diners could admire the coveted trophy, and then he carried it in to the people who had won it. At first, it was filled—probably with beer—and drunk from by players and their wives. Then it was cleaned and filled again—this time with soda, or perhaps juice—and given to the kids. It was the NHL’s version of Holy Communion, the high (tall) priests tipping the thirty-four-pound cup so the young could partake of its nectar.
South Florida’s sports teams, like its bad drivers, are shared by three counties—but there are degrees of affiliation. The Heat are Miami’s team, playing downtown on Biscayne Blvd. The Panthers, on the other hand, play in Sunrise and practice in Holiday Park, in a beautiful facility that on playoff nights became a surrogate arena, its restaurant and rink abuzz with fans—some homegrown, others nostalgic northern transplants. Broward is—as incongruous as the title may sound—South Florida’s hockey heartland.
Eric Weiner spoke at Books & Books about his new book Ben & Me. Each chapter title consists of an adjective followed by the word “Ben”: “Resting Ben” “Bookish Ben” “Wandering Ben”. For Miami, Eric chose the chapter “Naked Ben.” Apparently, Franklin liked to sit without any clothes on, taking what he called “air baths.”
Afterwards, I joined Eric and his moderator, Dan Gretch, for a late-night snack. Both once worked at WLRN, the local NPR affiliate and, sitting outside on Giralda Avenue, they caught up on news. The name of Carlos Frias came up; he had been the host of Sundial, an arts and culture show that was summarily cancelled in January, allegedly for being too Hispanic.
“Being too Hispanic in Miami,” Eric mused. “That’s like being too boring in Washington.” Yet WLRN is one of the last redoubts for Anglos in Miami, and apparently the bosses want to keep it that way. Never mind that Frias, a former Herald writer, was an excellent host, lively and engaged, and introduced listeners to interesting people in the community, not all of them Latino. He had me scheduled for the last week of January.
“He is a great Miami voice,” Dan said sadly.
Then he mentioned he was moving to Denver. He’s had it with the politics in Florida. It’s infuriating, he said, to raise a child here. He spoke angrily about the book bannings; a teacher at his child’s school, before she could assign a book for the summer, had to get a letter of approval from every child’s parents.
Well, perhaps it will get the parents reading.